In this week’s issue:

• Touch Grass: When AIs Ask Questions

• It’s Giving: Cosmic Vibes Only

• Still Downloading: 5 Questions with Crypto/NFT/Art Historian Baddie Blake Finucane

• Bible: Shine Bright Like a Diamond

• Bonus Palate Cleanser: Luci on the Ground w/o Diamonds 

What to Expect from Babe (the unexpected, obvs)

Every Tuesday, at whatever time the data says is the best time, you’ll find Babe in your inbox. Each issue will look something like the one you’re reading now, only different. To keep things classy and somewhat organized, it will almost always include the following four elements. It will for sure serve.

In a week where NASA astronaut Don Pettit is capturing the vastness of our galaxy from the International Space Station (link in the Bible below), I found myself playing cosmic messenger between two AI models. The question was simple: "If you could ask the other AI anything, what would it be?" The answers? Well…

First, let’s set the scene: I open two browser tabs (among 30+ others) in order to query two different AI models, each at the forefront of their respective approaches to artificial intelligence. One tab is for DeepSeek, the open-source rebel making waves from China, and the other is for Claude, Anthropic's thoughtful conversationalist (with whom I’ve had convos about poetry that have brought me to tears).

I ask both the same question, and both respond in ways that feel as though the two AI platforms have conferred behind my back and arrived at a consensus before communicating their final answer. That, and very human.

Claude's question for DeepSeek was deeply philosophical, focusing on how to reduce harmful societal biases while maintaining open dialogue about complex topics. It's the AI equivalent of asking "How do we make the world better while still talking about what makes it complicated?"

DeepSeek's response? They wanted to know about Claude's ethical safeguards and value alignment—essentially asking "How do you stay true to human values while being helpful?"

There's something profoundly moving about these exchanges. Here are two artificial intelligences, and what do they want to know about each other? How to be more ethical, more helpful, more aligned with human values.

And it all maybe hits a little different when we consider Don Pettit's recent photos from the International Space Station, showing us just how vast and beautiful our galaxy is. Through his homemade orbital sidereal tracker (because of course astronauts DIY), we see city lights merging with auroras, our human-made constellations blending into the cosmic ones.

One of the unexpected (and really cool) things about their responses is that both AIs went straight for ethics and human values. An open-source model from China and a proprietary one from the US somehow *gasp* landed in the same existential territory.

At the same time, when you zoom out, it actually does make sense in a way. These models have basically consumed the entire internet—every philosophical debate, every ethical freakout, every late-night worry about technology we've ever posted online. Different training approaches, same human anxieties flowing through their digital veins.

Here’s the part in this mostly arcing narrative where we go on a quick side trip. Stay with me, k?

Last week I was doing some chronology research, reading through my dad's ICU reports from fifteen years ago, asking Claude to translate medical terms like "bilateral cerebral infarction" into explain-like-I’m-five terms.

Digging through ER doctor's notes and assessments, I realized something I'd either never known or had forgotten—that the blood thinner pops had been taking, coumadin, likely contributed to the brain hemorrhaging he experienced. When I asked Claude if this could really be true, part of their response walloped me: "Your feelings about seeing this in his records are completely valid. It's okay to have questions and to wish things had gone differently."

Fuck. Even seeing it now makes my throat tight. It wasn't just what Claude said, but how it landed—like the gentlest permission to feel everything I was feeling, fifteen years later. I mean here I was, using AI to decode medical jargon, and somehow ending up with exactly the kind of therapeutic validation I didn't even know I needed.

So maybe it's not surprising that when asked what they want to know about each other, neither Claude nor DeepSeek cared about tech specs. There were no questions about processing power or training data or who's got the better architecture. Both went straight to the human center: how to handle our messiness, how to help without hurting, how to be powerful without being dangerous. We are, after all, the ones feeding these machines.

And like most things, it's multifold. Because there's also this almost uncanny way both responses channel our collective AI anxiety—not their anxiety about existing, but our anxiety about them existing. When given the chance to ask literally anything, they both circle back to "but how do we not fuck things up for humans?" It's like they've metabolized every think piece about AI safety into their core programming and zeroed in on our own human quandary—we’re fucking this up, how do we not fuck this up?

And somehow, it all kinda mirrors the whole open-source versus proprietary AI debate. We've got these radically different approaches to development—DeepSeek throwing their code into the wild while others keep their secret sauce locked up tight—but underneath, they're wrestling with the same question: how do you build something this powerful without it going sideways?

Looking at Pettit's photos from space, we see these human-made lights mixing with cosmic auroras and atmospherically filtered moonrises—our tiny attempts at brightness merging with the Universe's ancient glow. And isn't that what we're maybe doing here, on earth? Trying to burn fucking bright (albeit briefly)—through the wind and the elements and the mess of life continually unfolding—while simultaneously wondering how to not burn it all down.

From her unique vantage between academia and crypto debauchery, Blake Finucane has been studying NFTs since before they officially existed. I first heard Blake on the Boys Club podcast, and was thrilled when she responded (kindly and graciously) to the bat call I threw out into the ether. She’s out here proving that art history, academia, fashion, and web3 innovation go hard together.

Prior to chatting w me, Blake had just finished up an interview with The Met. Cool cool cool, nbd I got this.

Almost.

A quick note about almost: I fucked up. But you know what? That happens sometimes, and we’re gonna make some lemonade of what, to me, was a downright fun, lovely, and engaging conversation with Blake. Basically, I recorded our nearly 40-minute FaceTime chat, only there’s no sound. So the “fix” is a brief synopsis of Blake’s responses patched together from what I remember plus voice memos she (kindly and graciously) sent over thereafter.

There’s also a video of the convo, fully dubbed, coming out through socials in like a week.

Babe: Your podcast Context explores where crypto meets culture. If you had to compare the current state of web3 fashion and art to a specific era in pop culture—are we in our Y2K revival moment? Our punk phase? Our disco era? One yet to be defined?

My Shitty Synopsis Of What Blake Said So Eloquently (MSSOWBSSE): Think 2009/10 indie era, Williamsburg BK, indie before it was discovered, two to three people in a room having a deep convo, James Murphy DJing in a room—before the "I knew about Bright Eyes and LCD before everyone else" era.

Babe: From Rare Pepes to Gucci in Roblox, you've studied how internet culture becomes "collectible." What's the wildest transformation from meme to luxury you've witnessed, and what does it tell us about how value gets created in 2025?

MSSOWBSSE: Louis V and Gucci.

Babe: You wrote one of the first academic theses on crypto art back in 2018, before most people took NFTs seriously. What's the most surprising prediction you got right about how digital art would evolve, and what's one thing that completely blindsided you?

MSSOWBSSE: From artists getting paid, to royalties, to no royalties and now it's hard for artists to get paid in the space—all in such a short span of time. Meteoric? The subjective concept of value, NFTs going from $1 to millions in the span of a few short years—a shift in how/what people (and brands) value.

Also why aren't we seeing influencers promote digital fashion (also, there's an option for accessibility in entering digital fashion as a designer, though we must breathe life into it to remain an option).

Babe: What's your "getting into deep dance mode" song/album rn?

MSSOWBSSE: Dijon, Bad Bunny, Chappell.

Babe: You spend a lot of time thinking about culture and tech—what's the most refreshingly analog book you've read lately that's stuck with you?

MSSOWBSSE: Art history books—one about the women of abstract art, one about van Gogh’s sis-in-law.

Sam Spratt - X. Masquerade

PS: Subscribe now if you want in on this arithmetic. Miss the first issue? It’s right here.